“Chess, the eminently cerebral game, is
even thought provoking in ways unrelated to the movement of pieces on the
board.” Truer words were never spoken. So, begins a piece on chess
intelligence by Erk Lief of the
American Council on Science and Knowledge. It turns out that the article was
inspired by a piece in Michigan State University’s MSU TODAY,
also viewed at Science Codex, and that concerned some
recent, interesting research on the subject of chess intelligence. All the talk
goes back to an article recently published by people at the MSU Expertise Lab,
which
must be an interesting place. These articles discussed how some researchers
from the Expertise Lab arrived at some conclusions about the kind of
intelligence required to be good at chess. I think I have a good understanding
of the kinds of intelligence required to be a good chess player. How do I know?
Because throughout various periods of my life I have spent way too much time playing
and studying chess. I love it way too much. When I finally accepted the fact
that I would never make Master, then I set out to find out why. The result was
worth the effort because it made me feel a little less stupid to finally
discover why I will never make Chess Master, even though I would still give my
left hand for the privilege.

The research design was
a meta-analysis that started with nearly 2300 articles representing research
into chess intelligence. The team then focused on studies that contained
numerical indicators of intelligence and chess expertise, such as IQ scores and
the standard chess player’s rating of level called the ELO score. That was an
enormous amount of work.

I wasn’t very
satisfied with those ideas. Chess intelligence goes a lot deeper than that. So,
I decided to look at the article itself. It appears in the journal Intelligence and below I present the
abstract with a link. This team did an enormous amount of work in executing
this research. I want to be clear and say that because the results are not
theirs to be criticized. I was anxious to review this meta-analysis, because it
is an important piece of research in the field of chess intelligence. Yet, I
was not much more satisfied with the abstract, which is worth duplicating,
especially because it is a large meta-analysis. That means this juicy article
arguably represents and summarizes about five decades’ worth of research into
chess intelligence. This should represent some kind of global statement about
the overall skill set required to be a good chess player. By the way, when I
say good, I mean Master. Here are the results of the study:

First,
these correlations are not that high, so the associations are not very strong.
Second, it is also a little surprising that verbal ability and visuospatial
ability are not nearly as positively associated with chess intelligence as
numerical ability, which must mean math. It is curious that they have measures
of short-term memory but no measures of eidetic memory. Third, it is
interesting that the results overall were stronger among young players and
lower levels of skill.

Let’s
unpack each of these findings and go a little deeper.

1.These
correlations are not that high, so the associations are not very strong.

If the
correlations were over r = .50, then I would be suitably impressed. But, to me
the story here is that measures of intelligence have little correlation, or at
least a relatively weak association, with chess expertise. If you asked anyone
on the street, everyone would guess that the correlations between chess players
and measures of cognitive and intelligence skills would be through the roof.
But, one important thing to consider here is the idea that the classic psychology
IQ test is actually an interactive experience in which the test taker leads the
test giver through a series of questions and problems to solve. At the end, the
test giver has scored the test taker, and the result is held up as that
person’s IQ score forever.

But, what if you had a bad breakfast
that morning, or no breakfast? What if you are slightly autistic and you shy
away from interaction? What if you are so shy and withdrawn from social life,
and so intelligent at chess, that you could not care less what anybody thought
about anything you did - especially your performance on an IQ test? There is
reason to believe that an inability to interact well with the test giver for
any number of reasons might bias the test giver against the test taker. It is
impossible to imagine that the test giver has never erred either for or against
the score given to every child ever tested.

2.Verbal
ability and visuospatial ability are less associated with chess intelligence than
numerical ability, which must mean mathematical ability … no measures of eidetic memory.

Chess players
are not the most sociable people on the planet. They are certainly not all
diagnosably autistic, but among Chess Masters there is unquestionably a
predilection for the kind of person who is quiet, even-tempered, patient,
inquisitive, and contemplative. However,
there is also a predilection for people with language gifts. As many world
chess champions have been journalists as mathematicians or engineers. Many of
these people are also multilingual. For a Chess Master, chess is like learning
and speaking another language. But, the elite player learns not to speak that
language too literally, which is what all the mere mortals do, again and again.
There is literal chess, and then there is poetic chess, and the greatest
masters have composed games as eloquent as any piece of music or art.